Bizerta, the great naval base and fortress on the northern coast of Tunisia, is a French pistol aimed straight at the head of Italy—or perhaps it would be a closer simile to say the toe. It commands the narrowest part of the Mediterranean, where the Middle Sea contracts to a width of less than four score miles. In fact, were the French to mount on Cape Bon a gun having the range of the one with which, in the spring of 1917, the Germans shelled Paris, they could drop their projectiles on the shores of Sicily.

It will be remembered that when, in 1881, the bey of Tunis was forced to acquiesce in a French protectorate, the most violent resentment was aroused in Italy, which had long regarded Tunisia, with its large Italian population, as within her own sphere of influence and was only awaiting a propitious moment and a plausible pretext to bring that country under the rule of Rome. Even to-day, indeed, after more than a third of a century of French occupation, Mussolini and his fellow-imperialists regard Tunisia as a sort of African terra irredenta, which, when a favorable opportunity offers, they purpose to “redeem.” So, when the French began the construction of an impregnable stronghold at Bizerta in 1890, they made no secret of the fact that it was intended as a warning to Italy that the tricolor which had been raised over Tunisia nine years before would not be hauled down, and as a reminder to Britain that, Gibraltar, Malta, and the Canal notwithstanding, the Mediterranean was not a British lake.

During recent years the French government has poured out money like water in the development of Bizerta until to-day it is one of the strongest fortresses in the world. The Lake of Bizerta, which forms the inner harbor, accessible through the outer harbor and a canal, is nine miles from the sea and contains fifty square miles of anchorage for the largest vessels. A great arsenal has been created at Sidi Abdallah, at the southeastern extremity of the lake, with dry-docks for repairing the largest battle-ships, wharves, workshops, and warehouses, while at Ferryville, a few years ago a sandy waste, a modern town with well-built dwellings for the thousands of laborers employed in the dockyard has sprung up as though at the wave of a magician’s wand. Barracks have been built for the housing of the garrison, and the muzzles of long-range guns peer menacingly from the elaborate chain of fortifications which encircle the approaches to the harbor and the town. If, as has been hinted, Mussolini occasionally turns an acquisitive eye toward Tunisia, he should not overlook Bizerta. It would be a hard nut to crack.

My daughter, Bettie, had never been to Africa before, and so, when the steamer docked at Bizerta, she was naturally eager to go ashore and see the sights despite my warning that it was a colorless, uninteresting town, and that, as her first glimpse of Africa, it would be a disappointment. Now it is a curious fact that new-comers to a country frequently have more thrilling experiences in the first few hours of their visit than befall old-timers in a lifetime. For example, Sir Theodore Cook, editor of the “Field,” once told me that during his first day in New York, while drinking a glass of beer in a saloon in Park Row, the glass was shattered in his hand by a gangster’s bullet intended for the bartender.

It was a Sunday morning when we went ashore at Bizerta, and the town was as peaceful as a rural community in France. But as we were strolling through the tortuous byways of the picturesque Andalusian quarter—founded by the Moors driven from Spain—a pistol barked in a doorway, and the report was echoed by a woman’s scream. French gendarmes, native goumiers, and military police came on the run, followed, it seemed, by half the population of the town. In less time than it takes to tell about it the narrow thoroughfare was packed from wall to wall with an excited mob.

“What’s the trouble?” I inquired of a zouave who emerged from the press about the doorway.

“N’importe, m’sieur. N’importe,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders. “A rascally Senegalese has just murdered an Arab woman.”

“And you told me,” my daughter said reproachfully, “that I wouldn’t find Bizerta interesting!”

The dense gray fog, which had hung like a pall over the wintry Mediterranean since shortly after our departure from Marseilles, abruptly lifted as we left Bizerta, and thence onward to La Goulette the Tunisian coast unrolled its panorama bright and clear under the February sunshine. As I leaned on the rail, my glasses trained upon the shore-line, which slipped past as on a motion-picture screen, a White Father emerged from the smoke-room and joined me.

Shortly he tapped me upon the shoulder.

“Look, my son! Look! Over there....”

With my glasses I followed the direction of his outstretched finger. But all that I could discern was a range of distant violet mountains and in the middle foreground, rising somewhat abruptly from the plain which sloped down to meet the shingled strand, a low, isolated hill. Its lower slopes were clothed with vegetation—fields of barley, vineyards, patches of cactus—broken here and there by what appeared to be huge rubbish-heaps and excavation mounds. Higher up, amid dark clumps of cypress-trees, I could make out some scattered, white-walled buildings, one of them, judging from the gilded cross which surmounted it, a church. At the foot of the hill, near the margin of the sea, the sun was reflected dazzlingly from the surface of two small, curiously shaped ponds.

“Delenda est Carthago,” quoted the priest.

“There is all that remains,” he continued, “of what was once the most famous and powerful city in the world. The horseshoe-shaped lagoon with the island in its center is a vestige of Hamilcar’s military harbor, where the war-galleys were moored. On the summit of yonder hill Dido’s palace is believed to have stood. On that narrow neck of land to the eastward the army of Regulus was annihilated by the Carthaginians under Xanthippus, and there, a century later, the victorious forces of Scipio Africanus pitched their camp. The white chapel atop the plateau marks the spot where St. Louis died while leading the Last Crusade.”

It was as though he had uttered an incantation. At his words the scene seemed to change before my eyes as one stereopticon picture dissolves into another. The fog-banks which had lifted were the mists of centuries. Now I was looking down the vista of the ages. In my mind’s eye a mighty, glittering metropolis crowned that green and russet hill. A hot African sun beat down upon its massive ramparts, upon the gilded roofs of its towers and temples, upon its marble palaces and porphyry colonnades. Brazen chariots tore through its narrow, teeming streets; squadrons of horsemen maneuvered on the plain; elephants with jeweled trappings rocked and rolled along. The smoke of sacrificial fires rose from the altar before the great temple, where stood the statue of the horned god Baal. Relieving the masses of masonry here and there were patches of verdure, the sacred groves dedicated to the worship of the goddess Tanith. A vessel with billowing sails of Tyrian purple slipped along the shore. Out from the harbor-mouth shot a file of lean, long triremes, ostrich-feathers of foam curling from their bows as they leaped forward at the urge of the triple banks of oars. I was looking on the city which had been mistress of the Mediterranean for upward of half a thousand years; whose argosies had explored the unknown coasts of Africa and Gaul and Spain, venturing even beyond the Pillars of Hercules in their quest of the Hesperides; the city whose name is still synonymous with pomp and pride and power—Carthage, which had disputed the Empire of the World with Rome!

But the vision faded as abruptly as it had appeared when a French destroyer, inky clouds belching from her slanting funnels, fled across our bows. A sea-plane, bands of the tricolor painted on its under wings, went booming overhead. Fishing-craft with ruddy lateen sails appeared, swarthy, red-fezzed fishermen hauling at the nets. A puffing tugboat bustled officiously alongside, and the pilot nimbly climbed the swaying ladder. Bells jangled in the engine-room. And the Duc d’Aumale, slowed to half-speed, swept past the thickets of bristling masts which fringe the wharves of La Goulette and entered the throat of the buoyed channel which leads through the shallow lake of El Bahira to Tunis.

Though a seaport, Tunis, it should be understood, is not on the sea itself but some seven miles inland. The Tunisian capital occupies a most peculiar site, being built upon the narrow isthmus which separates the stagnant waters of El Bahira, “the little sea,” from the salt lagoon of Sebkhet es Sedjoumi. Notwithstanding the fact that, next to Algiers, Tunis is the largest and most important city in French Africa, it is only within recent years that it has been directly accessible to ocean-going vessels.

The project of creating a port at the very doors of Tunis was first entertained by the late bey, who in 1880 granted a concession for the purpose, but with the reorganization of the country after the French occupation the contract was canceled. Some years later, however, the enterprise was revived, the task of constructing the harbor, and of connecting it with the sea by dredging a canal, seven miles in length, through El Bahira, being undertaken by a French company.

With the completion of the port and the canal, La Goulette—or Goletta, as the English call it—lost its former importance, declining from a busy harbor, its roadsteads crowded with the ships of many nations, to a sleepy fishing-village. During the summer months, however, it regains a certain measure of its old-time activity, its population being almost doubled by the Tunisians who, unable to get away to Europe, go there for the sea-bathing and the breezes. Though La Goulette is of yesterday, its Venetian charm happily remains undimmed. Its houses, built with the stones of ancient Carthage, have been mellowed by time and the sun to ivory and terra-cotta; a reminder of its tumultuous past is provided by the fortress of Barbarossa, from which thousands of Christians taken captive by the red-bearded corsair were released when Charles V carried it by storm in 1535; the encircling waters of the Mediterranean and El Bahira are of a glorious blue, flotillas of fishing-barks with painted sails dot its placid surface and flocks of pink flamingos stalk sedately along its shores.

Darkness was close at hand when we steamed past La Goulette, and the purple African night had descended upon the land when we entered the harbor of Tunis. Dimly the old, old city loomed before us, its proportions clearly defined by twinkling street-lamps which grew fainter as they climbed the hill surmounted by the kasbah and the palace of the bey; while in the foreground danced the reflection of the riding-lights of the vessels in the harbor. I have always maintained that there are certain cities at which, in order to obtain the full flavor of their mystery and charm, one should arrive after nightfall, and Tunis is one of them.

While the steamer was being warped with aggravating deliberation into her berth, I looked down from the rail upon the picturesque scene and gave a sigh of contentment. It was good to sniff again the smell of Africa, to be back in the Orient once more. I breathed deep of the soft night air, laden with the fragrance of orange-blossoms, jasmine, and bougainvillea. After the glare of the sea, my eyes were rested by the dim outlines of the buildings, garish enough by day but of ivory and amber loveliness when bathed in the light of the moon. I reveled in the color and picturesqueness of the throng waiting on the wharf below.

Ranged along the edge of the quay, very gorgeous and self-important in their gold-laced jackets and voluminous trousers, were the dragomans and runners from the various hotels and tourist-agencies; alert, energetic fellows, speaking a smattering of many tongues, who spend their lives on steamship-wharves and railway-station platforms, welcoming the arriving and speeding the parting guest. Beyond them was a little group of wealthy young Tunisians, in immaculately ironed tarbooshes and spotless burnouses of the most delicate colors, one of them with a crimson blossom worn behind his ear, come to welcome some friend returning from Paris or Monte Carlo. A pair of bearded, hawk-nosed spahis paced slowly up and down, their enormous white turbans bound with ropes of camel’s-hair, long scarlet cloaks hanging to their booted and spurred heels. And well at the back, kept in their place by the whip of a native goumier, was a vociferous throng of Arab and negro porters, shouting and gesticulating for the first chance to make a franc by carrying ashore our luggage, and waiting, like sprinters on the mark, for the lowering of the gang-plank to storm the ship as their ancestors, the Barbary pirates, did of old.

Drawn up beside the customs shed was a powerful car of American make with a uniformed kavass from the residency and an alert-faced chauffeur in trim gray whipcord standing beside it.

“For Colonel Powell?” I asked the chauffeur in French as we set foot ashore.

“Yes, sir,” was the reply, in the unmistakable nasal twang of New England. “But you needn’t speak to me in French unless you want to. My name is Harvey Wilson and I’m from Providence, Rhode Island.”

Wilson, it developed, was a former member of the A. E. F. Instead of returning to America with his regiment after the Armistice, he had married a French girl and settled in Algiers as a motor mechanic and chauffeur. He drove us for upward of six thousand kilometers over desert roads, mountain roads, and across regions where there were no roads worthy of the name whatsoever. He had a profound knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of a motor; under the most trying conditions he never lost his patience or his temper; and his unfailing good humor won him the friendship of Europeans, Arabs, Berbers, and Moors alike. When we parted, months later, on the frontier of Morocco, I told him that it would give me genuine pleasure to recommend him to any one who contemplated motoring in North Africa, and I am now keeping that promise.

Mrs. Powell and I had been in Africa so many times that for us the drive through the brilliantly lighted streets to the hotel held little novelty. Our chief concern was whether we should find awaiting us a room with bath, for the hotels of Tunis are limited in number—the good hotels, I mean—and during the tourist season they are always overcrowded, so that it is the part of prudence to reserve one’s accommodations well in advance.

But my daughter Bettie was fascinated by the unfamiliar street scenes: the ceaseless stream of men wearing every form of head-covering—hats, helmets, hoods, tarbooshes, turbans; the stately Arabs, the elders looking for all the world like Old-Testament patriarchs; the bare-legged Berber porters in ragged garments of coarse brown camel’s-hair, sacks drawn over their heads to be used as sun-shades or overcoats according to the weather; the gaudily uniformed soldiers of the Beylical Guard, who might have stepped straight from a comic-opera chorus; the veiled women slipping silently along like sheeted ghosts; the groups of natives squatted about their cooking-pots, from which strange smells assailed the nostrils; the files of swaying, supercilious camels laden with the products of the South; the droves of patient little asses trotting demurely along beneath enormous burdens; the high whitewashed walls of the houses, broken by mysterious latticed windows, from which the eyes of unseen, jealously guarded women were peering down, no doubt; the fleeting glimpses caught through doors ajar of Oriental courtyards filled with color—to her this was one of the Thousand and One Nights. Ah, me ... what wouldn’t I give to again be seeing Africa for the first time through the eyes of youth!

Notwithstanding the French occupation, Tunis remains distinctly Oriental. The town is like a veiled woman of the harem wearing a pair of European shoes, incongruous and clumsy. And it is the shoes which the visitor arriving by sea sees first. For the district bordering on the harbor is Italian—an unlovely, odoriferous neighborhood of mean streets lined with squalid hovels where dwell some fifty thousand Sicilians and Maltese, who outnumber the French by more than two to one—while the quarter bisected by the Avenue Jules Ferry is characteristically French, with spacious, tree-planted boulevards, enticing shops, banks, theaters, cinemas, and electric tram-cars. This really imposing thoroughfare, with its fine stores and crowded open-air cafés, might be, indeed, a sort of continuation of the Cannebière in Marseilles interrupted by the Mediterranean. Its principal mercantile establishment, the Petit Louvre, is a creditable imitation of the mammoth Magazins du Louvre in Paris, with which, incidentally, most American women appear to be better acquainted than they are with the palace of the same name on the other side of the Rue de Rivoli. But all this, I repeat, is only that portion of Tunis revealed below the hem of her enveloping Eastern garments. The old Tunis, with its mosques and palaces, its labyrinth of bazaars rising gradually to the kasbah, is as Oriental as the Baghdad of Harun-al-Rashid.

Most Europeans seem to be under the impression that Tunis is a modern city—modern, at least, in comparison with Carthage. As a matter of fact, however, Tunis (or Thines, as it was originally known) had probably been in existence for some three or four hundred years when the fugitive Dido landed on the shores of the Gulf of Tunis and on the little hill of Byrsa founded Carthage. This view is accepted by no less an authority than the historian Freeman. But for centuries Tunis was overshadowed and eclipsed by the magnificence of her younger sister, sinking to the position of a poor relation, a country cousin, a mere dependency. Yet she had her revenge. Not only has she outlived her haughty neighbor, but she has incorporated her very bones, for there is hardly a column or capital in Tunis which is not of Carthaginian origin. Here, indeed, we see a ghost of Carthage, for the native city must very closely resemble what the commercial quarter of Carthage was five-and-twenty centuries ago.

The car came gently to a halt before the Hotel Majestic, a spacious hostelry whose architect had sought, without conspicuous success, to graft the Moorish style on the European. An Arab chasseur in red and gold flung open the door. A swarm of servants in green baize aprons hurled themselves upon our luggage. We were greeted by the director, a suave Frenchman, who might have been an undertaker, judging from his somber garments and excessive dignity. Rooms had been reserved for us by the residency, he said. I remarked that I hoped that we were to have a bath. Mais certainement, un grand bain—un bain de luxe. Would we ascend and view it? We crowded, the four of us, into an ascenseur which could not possibly have been intended to carry more than two, and the Arab lift-boy squeezed himself in after us. It creaked, groaned, hesitated, almost stopped, but finally drew level with the floor which was its destination. I gave a sigh of relief, as I always do upon completing an ascent in a French elevator. We were ushered down an echoing, marble-paved corridor, chilly as a tomb, to our rooms. Mrs. Powell tried the hot-water faucet and inquired about the voltage for her electric curling-iron. I sent the maid scurrying for extra blankets and softer pillows, and ordered a drink of Scotch. But my daughter Bettie stood on the balcony in the moonlight, looking out upon the white city and inhaling the subtle fragrance of the orange-blossoms. You see, she had never been in Africa before.